INTP

Abraham Lincoln

U.S. President (R)

Lincoln: "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy."

[When a critic called him a two-faced liar:]
Lincoln: "If I had another face, do you think I would wear this one?"

Karl Marx: "[Lincoln] ... gives his most important actions the most commonplace form. ... Even when he is gripped by an idea, he talks [in dry phrases]."

Karl Marx: "[He behaves] as though apologizing for being compelled by circumstances 'to act the lion.'"

Ulysses S. Grant: "Lincoln ... was willing to trust his generals in making and executing their plans."

[Lincoln's law partner:] "He cared little for simple facts. ... It was the underlying principle ... that Lincoln [cared about]."

INTP

Albert Einstein

Physicist

Einstein: "To punish me for my contempt for authority, Fate made me an authority myself."

Einstein: "Hume has permanently influenced the development of the best of philosophers who came after him. One senses him in the reading of Russell's philosophical analyses, whose acumen and simplicity of expression have often reminded me of Hume."

Robert Oppenheimer: "There was always with him a wonderful purity at once childlike and profoundly stubborn."

Stephen Hawking: "When a book was published entitled '100 Authors Against Einstein,' he retorted, 'If I were wrong, then one would have been enough!'"

C.G. Jung: "Einstein is so very concentrated on his own ideas."

C.G. Jung: "Quantum theory ... was a thorn in [Einstein's] eye. [To him] everything should be rational, but it isn't."

INTP

Charles Darwin

Biologist

Darwin: "A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections - a mere heart of stone."

Darwin: "With me, the horrid doubt always arises."

Darwin: "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: It is those who know little ... who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."

Darwin: "I love fools' experiments. I am always making them."

Darwin: "A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with ... principles."

Darwin: "I had a high notion of Aristotle's merits, but [until I read him] I had not the most remote notion what a wonderful man he was."

INTP

Richard Dawkins

Biologist, author of 'The Selfish Gene' and 'The God Delusion'

Dawkins: "What worries me about religion is that it teaches people to be satisfied with not understanding."

Dawkins: "My passion is for scientific truth. I don't much care about good and evil. ... I care about what's true."

Dawkins: "I don't want to sound callous ... even if I have nothing to offer ... that doesn't mean that what anybody else has to offer [is] true."

[On the school he is considering starting:]
Dawkins: "I am almost pathologically afraid of indoctrinating children. ... It would be a 'Think for Yourself Academy.'"

INTP

Hannah Arendt

Philosopher and author of 'The Human Condition', dated Martin Heidegger

Arendt: "Thinking ... interrupts all doing, all ordinary activities no matter what they happen to be. ... The moment we start thinking ... we stop everything else."

Arendt: "If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to 'demand' its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant."

Arendt: "Nietzsche ... has caused [philosophers] so much confusion."

Arendt: "The business of thinking ... undoes every morning what it had finished the night before."

INTP

Marie Curie

Nobel prize in both physics and chemistry

Curie: "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood."

Curie: "I am among those who think that science has great beauty."

Curie: "Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas."

Einstein: "Marie Curie is, of all [famous people], the only one whom fame has not corrupted."

INTP

Immanuel Kant

Philosopher

Kant: "There is nothing higher than reason."

Kant: "A [monarch] may evaluate his own governance. He can do this when ... he lays upon himself the reproach 'the Ruler is not above the Rules.'"

Kant: "I am an investigator by inclination. I feel a great thirst for knowledge."

Kelley L. Ross: "[Kant] wishes to construe reason as no more than the formal rules that become evident in logic."

Hannah Arendt: "Kant ... was much bothered by the common opinion that philosophy is only for the few ... because of this opinion's moral implications."

INTP

John Locke

Philosopher

Locke: "To love truth for truth's sake is ... the seed-plot of all other virtues."

Locke: "Logic is the anatomy of thought."

Locke: "Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours."

Locke: "Religion, which ... ought most particularly elevate us, as rational creatures ... is that where men often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts."

INTP

James Madison

U.S. President and author of the Constitution

Madison: "Truth [comes only] from those ... who cultivate their reason."

Madison: "Religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together."

Madison: "Toleration is a gift, free men excise their rights."

Madison: "In ... assemblies ... passion [wrests] the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob."

Garry Wills: "As a framer and defender of the Constitution [Madison] had no peer."

Richard Brookhiser: "Madison lived in his head and public speaking did not come naturally to him."

Richard Brookhiser: "Madison loathed Hamilton and loved Jefferson above all."

INTP

Adam Smith

Economist

Smith: "Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition."

Smith: "[I endeavor to find] the connecting principles of nature ... which bind together all ... disjointed objects. [Principles] introduce order into this chaos of jarring and discordant appearances."

Smith: "[To discover principles is] to allay the tumult of the imagination, and to restore it ... to ... tranquility and composure."

Smith: "I am a slow, a very slow workman. [I] do and undo everything I write at least half a dozen of times before I can be tolerably pleased with it."

The Times [in 1790:] "Being in his youth a hard student ... his appearance was ungracious and his address awkward. His frequent absence of mind gave him an air of vacancy."

Milton Friedman: "There is not a line in 'The Wealth of Nations' that is not still applicable to this day."

INTP

Friedrich A. Hayek

Economist and philosopher, author of 'The Road to Serfdom', cousin of Ludwig Wittgenstein

Hayek: "It may indeed prove to be far the most difficult and not the least important task for human reason rationally to comprehend its own limitations."

Milton Friedman: "My interest in political philosophy was rather casual until I met Hayek."

Ronald Reagan: "Hayek is amongst the top 2-3 of the all the people who ever influenced me."

[Banging a copy of Hayek's 'The Constitution of Liberty' on the table at a policy meeting in the Conservative Party:]
Margaret Thatcher: "This is what we believe!"

Karl Popper: "I have learned more from Hayek than from any other living thinker, except perhaps Alfred Tarski - but not even excepting Russell."

INTP

Milton Friedman

Economist, father of David Friedman

Friedman: "To really understand something you've got to reduce it to its principles."

Friedman: "In every discipline, progress comes from people who make hypotheses, most of which turn out to be wrong, but all of which ultimately point to the right answer."

[Asked if he was a libertarian:]
Friedman: "I'm much more interested in having people thinking about the ideas, rather than the person."

Friedman: "The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill said. ... The proper role of government is to prevent other people from harming an individual [and not much else]."

David Friedman: "[With my father] it was simply taken for granted that what mattered was how good your arguments were, not who was making them."

INTP

Thomas Aquinas

Philosopher and theologian

Aquinas: "Reason in man is rather like God in the world."

Anthony Kenny: "[To Aquinas] the senses are what we have in common with dumb animals. ... Our better part [is] the mind ... and [its] intellectual contemplation."

Anthony Kenny: "[To Aquinas] the intellect [stands] at the summit of ... the human soul."

Ayn Rand: "Aquinas brought an Aristotelian view of reason back into European culture, and lighted the way toward the Renaissance."

C.G. Jung: "St. Thomas is really a great man quite apart from his saintliness."

INTP

René Descartes

Philosopher

Descartes: "Cogito ergo sum."
("I think, therefore I am.")

Descartes: "Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems."

Allen W. Wood: "Descartes recommended that we distrust the senses and rely on the ... use of our intellect."

Kelley L. Ross: "Descartes is justly regarded as the Father of Modern Philosophy. This is not because of the positive results of his investigations, which were few, but because of the questions ... and problems that he [raised], problems that have still not been answered."

Journal of First Principles: "Descartes ... taught that the cause of error lies in the will, not the intellect."

INTP

Parmenides

Greek philosopher, student of Xenophanes, mentor of Zeno

Parmenides: "Let reason alone decide."

Parmenides: "You must learn all things, both the unshaken heart of truth, and the opinions of mortals in which there is no warranty."

Daniel W. Graham: "It may be a historical fact that Parmenides is a kind of super-logician."

Scott Austin: "[The thinking of] later philosophers appears softer by comparison."

Edward Hussey: "Like Descartes, Parmenides is trying to find an unassailable starting-point on which something further can be built."

Karl Popper: "I have spoken to Einstein and he admitted to me that his theory was in fact no different from the one of Parmenides."

Socrates: "Parmenides is the one being whom I respect above all others."

INTP

Thucydides

Greek historian

Thucydides: "Few things are brought to a successful issue by impetuous desire, but most by calm and prudent forethought."

Thucydides: "The bravest are surely those who have the clearest [understanding of] what is before them ... and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it."

Jared Diamond: "[His] insights into politics and war are universal and still relevant; his moral and psychological reflections on war and history are profound."

Jared Diamond: "His book is considered to have laid the foundations of the discipline of history."

INTP

Jimmy Wales

Founder of Wikipedia

Wales: "My style is somehow reflected in the Wikipedia style. A friend says it's a really good quality and also very infuriating that I'm so neutral all the time."

[When told he has been called a new and more open type of leader, the opposite of the command and control of Jack Welch:]
Wales: "I think there is something to that, in fact to the point where I am not always comfortable being called a leader."

INTP

Paul Allen

Founder of Microsoft along with Bill Gates

Allen: "My style [is] to absorb all the data I [can] to make the best-informed decision possible ... sometimes to the point of over-analysis."

Allen: "I'm a stubbornly logical person."

Allen: "Sometimes I [am] absentminded."

Allen: "Bill Gates and I [soon] found a groove together. I was the idea man. ... Bill listened and challenged me, and then homed in on my best ideas to help make them a reality. Our collaboration had a natural tension, but mostly it worked productively and well."

Allen: "Bill would test my ideas. I would come to him with another 10 ideas that never went anywhere - he was the sanity check. [But] when it came to selling and marketing ... he was much more excited on the business side, so we became very complementary."

INTP

Larry Page

Founder of Google along with Sergey Brin

Page: "Building things ... is a really interesting intellectual exercise."

Page: "I find that [pursuing truth] is more important than trying to control people."

Page: "Part of our brand is that we're pretty understated."

Page: "Google is actually a great argument for [doing] pure research [because] we didn't start out to do a search engine at all."

Page: "[Steve Jobs] kept telling me, 'You're doing too much at once.'"

Jan Yarow: "Page is more interested ... in lots of weird side projects [whereas] Mark Zuckerberg is focused 100% on Facebook's core business, and has never seemed to waver from that."

INTP

Sergey Brin

Founder of Google along with Larry Page

Brin: "I never rooted for [my schools'] sports teams. I was never one of the crowd supporting something or not. I like to maintain my independence."

Brin: "Managing people, and being emotionally sensitive, and all the skills you learn in terms of communication and keeping people motivated - [for me] that has been a challenge."

[Interviewer: "Do you tell yourself 'I changed the world'?"]
Brin: "That would be a little bit self-centered."

Larry Page: "[When Sergey and I first met] I thought he was pretty obnoxious. He had really strong opinions about things, and I guess I did, too."

John Battelle: "The Google founders are two swords sharpening one another."

INTP

Franz Kafka

Author of 'The Trial'

Kafka: "Something like my [mixture of characteristics] I have never found anywhere else: Cold indifference, a childish helplessness approaching the ridiculous, and a brutish complacence."

Kafka: "[I have] the indifference of a self-sufficient but coldly imaginative child."

Kafka: "How easy it is to admire Napoleon!"

Peter Drucker: "What few people know is that outside his work as a fiction writer, Kafka is also the inventor of modern safety headgear, as used on construction sites."

INTP

Alan Greenspan

Chairman of the Federal Reserve, dated Barbara Walters

Greenspan: "I had always viewed myself as an observer of events, never as a partaker of them."

Greenspan: "I've never been entirely comfortable being cast as the person who calls the shots."

Greenspan: "I'm hardly Adam Smith, but I've got the same inquisitiveness about understanding the broad forces that define our age."

INTP

David Cronenberg

Filmmaker

Cronenberg: "I try to make things clear; I never try to make things deliberately ambivalent or cloudy."

Cronenberg: "I'm [not] looking in fear at science ... and worrying about where it's leading us. That's not the way I feel about it at all. I feel an incredible empathy for the process of science."

Andrew O'Hehir: "[Cronenberg] is a genuine intellectual. ... It'd be easy to imagine him as a writer or philosopher or historian."

Peter Garrett: "[He] is a cheerful, deep-thinking, mild-mannered college professor type."

Sam Maronie: "He is modest [and] in many ways ... his own worst critic."

INTP

Jesse Eisenberg

Actor

Eisenberg: "I can't exist in normal group situations ... where you have to ... jockey for position. I ... just withdraw."

Eisenberg: "[I became an actor through a] series of really weird events. ... I don't think I ever would've tried to be an actor."

Eisenberg: "[When] acting, then there's a prescribed way to behave; whereas in life there's no prescribed way. So acting [is] a comfortable way to get through the day."

Eisenberg: "When I was acting in a play I liked knowing my place - that I was this role, and other people were that role, and we could interact with each other in a way I felt was very clear to me."

Stephen Whitty: "His characters usually have a few things in common. They're extremely bright [and] yet they often seem more than a little confused about what people around them expect, emotionally."

INTP

Charlotte Gainsbourg

Actress and singer

Gainsbourg: "I didn't [try] to become [a performer]; it just happened when I was really young and then continued."

Gainsbourg: "I've never thought of myself as being an actress or being a singer. I'm uncomfortable with both."

Gainsbourg: "Everything that [deals with] being isolated I've felt very close to. ... Isolation [is] something ... that I understand well."

Gainsbourg: "It's normal to judge yourself and to be your own worst critic. It keeps you in a kind of reality."

Gainsbourg: "Self-questioning is my method."

INTP

Sigourney Weaver

Actress

Weaver: "[In my youth] I was very shy, very self-conscious. I didn't even decide to be an actress until [people] kept hiring me. I kind of backed into it."

[On her choice of characters:]
Weaver: "I've always been drawn to women who aren't very comfortable in the world. Who are isolated."

Weaver: "Have I ever doubted myself? Have I ever not?"

Weaver: "I feel self-doubt whether I'm doing something hard or easy."

Weaver: "Most [directors] didn't know what to do with me, so I ended up working with Ridley Scott and James Cameron. People who didn't much care for convention."

INTP

Tina Fey

Comedic writer and actress

Fey: "Comedy is only funny when it is telling the truth."

Fey: "I live every writer's fantasy of being mostly a writer, but getting to be on TV just a little bit to get acknowledgment for being a writer."

Amy Poehler: "[She doesn't] belly-flop into the pool at the pool party. She watches everybody else's flops and then writes a play about it."

Alec Baldwin: "She's so bright you're always wondering if you're boring her."

INTP

Asia Carrera

Adult film actress and member of Mensa

Carrera: "The more I learned about the histories of organized religion, the more convinced I became that people are extremely gullible, and that I need to get off my ass and start a religion of my own!"

Carrera: "[I am one of the guys when it comes to] gaming or computer skills, or even just all-around geekiness."

Carrera: "[My hobbies include] studying Wall Street and quantum physics."

Carrera: "I don't have a TV, and I don't party or socialize."

INTP

Ben Stein

Game show host and writer

Stein: "Many [people] fail because they don't get started - they don't go. They don't overcome inertia. They don't begin."

Stein [to the host on FOX News:] "You are doing the classic post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy."

George Miller: "His past is actually tightly woven with higher education, academia, and law. In fact, his personal history reads much more like a tenured professor's than a former game-show host."

INTP

Andreas Scholl

Countertenor

Scholl: "This is always a question for each singer to answer for himself. What do I stand for? What are my ideas? What am I doing?"

Scholl: "Some people ask me: 'Don't you feel limited by [only] singing Renaissance and Baroque music?' Well, [I reply] that is most of [the music] till this very day!"

Scholl: "[I am German in the sense that] Germans are known to be very self-critical and not too enthusiastic about themselves. ... We are not over-confident or praising ourselves too much."

xkcd

Randall Munroe

Cartoonist famous for 'xkcd'

Munroe: "Noticing when the stoplights are in sync, or calculating the length of your strides between floor tiles - normal people notice that kind of stuff, but a certain kind of person will do some calculations."

Munroe: "I go to goth clubs dressed as a frat guy so I can stand around and look terribly uncomfortable. At frat parties I do the same thing, but the other way around."

INTP

Max Weber

Sociologist and philosopher, author of 'The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism'

Weber: "The modern world is but a convergence of factors so unlikely to occur as to be practically an accident."

Weber: "A fully developed bureaucratic mechanism stands in the same relationship to other forms as does the machine to the non-mechanical production of goods. Precision, speed, clarity."

Weber: "Nothing is gained by assuming that, if only the [prospect] of a non-[capitalist] economy was investigated seriously enough, a suitable ... method [for running such an economy] would be discovered ... [This] problem is fundamental to any kind of [Marxism]."

INTP

Thales of Miletus

Greek philosopher

Bertrand Russell: "Western philosophy begins with Thales."

Aristotle: "Thales was the first of the Greek philosophers."

Nietzsche: "As a mathematician and an astronomer, Thales had a chilly relationship with allegory and myth."

Nietzsche: "Thales postulates a principle from which he makes deductions. He is foremost a systematizer."

INTP

Edward Gibbon

Historian and author of 'The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Gibbon: "Reading could not teach me to think. ... [Only] rational application [could do that]."

Churchill: "I set out [to read Gibbon and] was immediately dominated both by the story and the style. ... I [read] it from end to end and enjoyed it all."

Roderick Graham: "For Gibbon's objectivity in writing about Christianity, he was heavily censored then, and still is today."

David Hume [in a letter to Gibbon:] "The dignity of your style, the depth of your matter [and] the extensiveness of your learning [makes your work an] object of esteem."

INTP

Samuel Huntington

Political scientist, author of 'The Clash of Civilizations', mentor of Fukuyama

Huntington: "When people think seriously, they think abstractly; they conjure up ... concepts, theories, models, paradigms. Without such intellectual constructs, there is ... only ... confusion."

Huntington: "A lot people tend to think I'm a dogmatic ideologue - but I'm not."

Amina Chaudary: "For a man who authored such a combative and controversial theory, Huntington [is] remarkably quiet and soft-spoken."

Fareed Zakaria: "He was able to take policy debates and frame them in a much broader theoretical context."

Stanley Kurtz: "Philosophically [Fukuyama's] 'The End of History' and [Huntington's] 'The Clash of Civilizations' could hardly be more different. ... For Fukuyama, the mainspring of history is the ... yearning for equal recognition. [According to] Huntington ... humans [construct] identity [upon] hostility [to other] religions and cultures."

INTP

Hilary Putnam

Philosopher

Putnam: "[I] develop [through] self-criticism. ... I am always dissatisfied with something ... I have previously written."

Putnam: "I think Freud tried, as Marx tried, to make his discoveries a closed system of ideas. I don't believe in closed systems of ideas, but that is not to say that one cannot learn from Marx and Freud."

Putnam: "Wittgenstein's arguments often have a pedagogical character."

Putnam: "Kierkegaard [is] more of a poet than a philosopher."

INTP

Martha Nussbaum

Philosopher

Nussbaum: "It is always possible to retreat into your own thoughts, to say, 'I will live for my own thoughts.'"

Nussbaum: "I think the prime concern of philosophers is that you can never trust your own plans because everything is so fragile. So how are you going to live?"

Nussbaum: "[Chomsky is] amongst those intellectuals who think that one should not criticize one's friends, that solidarity is more important than correctness. ... It is loathsome."

Nussbaum: "[Butler's writing style] bullies the reader. ... Since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on."

INTP

John Mackey

Founder of Whole Foods

Mackey: "There seems to be something in human nature that wants to restrict other people. ... Some people seem to not be happy unless they're telling other people what to do - that they know best. That's always discouraging."

Mackey: "I don't like authoritarian managers."

Mackey: "I'm far less interested in being right ... than I am in personally learning and growing."

New Yorker: "[As CEO] he doesn't bother with day-to-day operations. ... When he's asked what it is he does, exactly, he describes a kind of philosopher-king, who brings big ideas to bear."

INTP

Linus Torvalds

Creator of Linux

Torvalds: "I'm really happy that I'm not a traditional manager. I don't have to manage logistics and people. I can worry purely about the technical side."

Torvalds: "I have a really hard time making any judgment."

Torvalds: "Lots of people have ideas. It's actually finishing them [that matters]."

Torvalds: "[I appreciate] Richard Dawkins for being such an outspoken critic of muddled thinking and anti-scientific thought."

INTP

Steven Levitt

Economist and author of 'Freakonomics'

Levitt: "I am one of the most closed-off people you'll ever find when it comes to emotional topics. I have never learned, or tried to learn how to express emotions. I'm not proud of this, it just is the truth."

Levitt: "I know I love my wife [but she] wishes I weren't such an emotional invalid."

INTP

Greg Mankiw

Economist and blogger

Mankiw: "In my view, it is best to consider all knowledge as tentative. The best scholars maintain an open-mindedness and humility about even their own core beliefs."

Mankiw: "The one defining characteristic of a good professor is to be open to all viewpoints."

Mankiw: "[In a debate, Krugman's] first inclination is to think that [his opponent] is either a liar or a fool. It's amazing to me that an academic would behave that way. ... No one has a monopoly on the truth."

INTP

Thomas Schelling

Economist and author of 'The Strategy of Conflict'

Schelling: "[I] try to be neutral, removed, vicarious, impartial, judicious."

Schelling: "I have often been glad that I wasn't in charge."

Schelling: "Most people ... do not get drawn into ethical abstractions [like I do]."

Michael Kinsley: "Schelling [strips] away irrelevant detail and exposes situations ranging from nuclear standoff ... to a family's decision about what to have for dinner as stark dramas of warring self-interest."

INTP

Elinor Ostrom

Economist

[Asked about her childhood visits to her aunt's home:]
Ostrom: "That was a wonderful experience for me, the discussions they had. It was a serious ... home, and the discussions were very serious."

Ostrom: "After designing multiple [grand] research projects ... it is time to try to put thoughts ... together [in a book] even though I am still not fully satisfied with my own understanding."

Jacqui Bauer: "Ostrom is ... unforgiving [of] herself. But she's endlessly forgiving of others."

INTP

Paul Graham

Essayist and tech startup investor at Y Combinator

Graham: "Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. In either case you let yourself be defined by what they tell you to do."

Graham: "Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers? If the answer is 'no', you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe ... odds are you just think whatever you're told."

Graham: "Occasionally the stimulation of talking ... makes you think of new things, but in general this is not going to generate ideas as well as writing does."

INTP

Alan Sokal

Physicist, responsible for the Sokal hoax

Sokal: "I'm merely a physicist with an amateur interest in the philosophy of science and perhaps some modest skill at thinking clearly."

Sokal: "I'm not trying to be strategic. I'm not a politician. I'm a physicist, an academic, and, if you want, an amateur philosopher."

Sokal: "I'm trying to say what I think is true as clearly and unemotionally as I can, and [then] leave it to people to judge if my arguments are right or wrong."

Sokal: "What precisely do I mean by 'silliness'? ... Meaningless or absurd statements, name-dropping, and the display of false erudition [as well as] sloppy thinking and poor philosophy."

INTP

David Keirsey

Psychologist and author of 'Please Understand Me II'

Keirsey: "It is to the Rational temperament that humanity owes its Directors, Inventors and Masterminds."

Keirsey: "If I do not want what you want, please try not to tell me that my want is wrong."

Keirsey: "If I ... fail to act, in the manner of your design for action, let me be."

INTP

Eric Berne

Psychoanalyst and author of 'Games People Play'

Berne: "Every once in a while I decide to get angry. It never pays off, and I can see really that what I've done is self-indulgence. It's sort of fun to get angry and it makes you feel that you're right. It never does any good. ... There is no reason for an adult to get angry."

Berne: "[My system] is a system for understanding people's behavior ... and for predicting people's behavior."

INTP

Nagarjuna

Buddhist philosopher and author of 'The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way'

Nagarjuna: "The wise man's mind does not strive but simply reflects, free of desire."

Steve Hagen: "Nagarjuna's teachings have undergirded virtually all of the ... developments [in Buddhist philosophy] ... since his day. ... It is the clarity that he brought ... that makes him stand out."

Kenneth Innada: "Nagarjuna is a giant among giants."

Christian Lindtner: "Nagarjuna's teaching is rather like Zeno's."

Dalai Lama: "[Einstein's theories] give an empirically tested texture to Nagarjuna's theory of time."

INTP

D.T. Suzuki

Writer on Zen and author of 'An Introduction to Zen Buddhism'

Suzuki: "Not to be bound by rules, but to be creating one's own rules - this is the kind of life [I'm] trying to have us live."

Suzuki: "We cannot put a stop to ... our philosophical inquiries any more than to our breathing."

Suzuki: "Oscar Wilde seems always posing or striving for an effect; he may be a great artist, but there is something ... that turns me away from him."

Richard H. Jones: "Suzuki [always] wanted Buddhism to appear 'scientific.'"

C.G. Jung: "Suzuki's works ... are among the best contributions to the knowledge of living Buddhism."

INTP

Fyodor Stcherbatsky

Philologist and author of 'Buddhist Logic'

Stcherbatsky: "The new born child and the animals are endowed with sensation and instinct ... but they do not possess discursive inference."

Stcherbatsky: "[In my book I discuss] logic [and] discursive thought [and] leave out instinct."

INTP

Steve Hagen

Zen master and author of 'Buddhism: Plain and Simple', student of Dainin Katagiri

Hagen: "We [should have] an open and inquiring frame of mind."

Hagen: "We should always be prepared to take another look at what we believe and begin to doubt it."

Hagen: "We must doubt and doubt again - doubt to the very bottom, to the ground, and then, doubt the ground itself."

Hagen: "Even in the simple statement 'I think,' Descartes had already ... assumed the existence of a self. ... Descartes clearly did not doubt enough."

INTP

Paul Dirac

Physicist

Dirac: "My life is mainly concerned with facts and not feelings."

Dirac: "If we are honest ... we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions. ... It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling."

Graham Farmelo: "Heisenberg [was] asked by Dirac, 'Why do you dance?' Heisenberg replied ... 'When there are nice girls it is a pleasure to dance.' Dirac looked thoughtful. After about five minutes of silence, he said, 'Heisenberg, how do you know beforehand that the girls are nice?'"

The Guardian: "When his wife exploded, 'What would you do if I left you?' [he thought] for a while and then [answered] 'I'd say, 'Goodbye, dear.''"

INTP

Maria Goeppert-Mayer

Physicist

Goeppert-Mayer: "Winning the [Nobel] prize wasn't half as exciting as doing the work."

[Her graduate student:] "Her lectures were ... very technical and highly condensed. Her facility with the methods of theoretical physics was overwhelming to most of the graduate students, in whom she inspired a considerable amount of awe."

INTP

Judith Rich Harris

Psychologist and author of 'The Nurture Assumption'

Harris: "What I learned about developmental psychology and social psychology I learned on my own."

Harris: "During the years I was writing psychology textbooks, I believed the evidence [for nurture's effect on children] too. But then I looked at it more closely and to my considerable surprise it fell apart in my hands. The evidence ... does not prove what it appears to prove."

Steven Pinker: "[Harris' contribution] was a devastating methodological critique that ... sent shockwaves throughout the academic community."

INTP

Juergen Habermas

Philosopher

Habermas: "In discourse, the unforced force of the better argument prevails."

Habermas: "When I dined with Foucault I had expected to meet a charlatan, but the man was in fact something entirely different - he was a philosopher!"

INTP

Marie-Louise von Franz

Psychologist and author, student of Jung

Von Franz: "My God, these Feeling types! ... Sensitive people are just tyrannical people - everybody else has to adapt to them."

Von Franz: "An extravert's [introspection] is especially genuine and and especially pure and deep. Extraverts are often so proud of this that they boast loudly about what great introverts they are. They try to make it a feather in their cap - which is [again] quite extraverted."

INTP

Anna Politkovskaya

Journalist and human rights activist

Politkovskaya: "What am I guilty of? I have merely reported what I witnessed, nothing but the truth."

Politkovskaya: "I have never sought my present pariah status. ... I am no political infighter."

[On being sent to meet with hostage takers:]
Politkovskaya: "As they had chosen me, I couldn't refuse [but] I am a very poor negotiator. I had no idea what to say [and] I'm not convinced that [sending me was] in any way effective."

INTP

Flemming Rose

Newspaper editor who solicited the Muhammad cartoons

Rose: "Doubt [is] the starting point of exploration and understanding of reality; doubt [is] the occasion for curiosity and the formulation of critical questions."

Rose: "Censoring the cartoons is very discriminating against Muslims because [it is] in fact saying, 'OK, we understand that you are so wild and uncivilized that we apply a different standard to you.' ... If I were a Muslim, I'd be very offended."

Rose: "[In the early 1930s] the Nazis were repeatedly arrested on the grounds of hate speech legislation. Hate speech laws proved a boon to Hitler."

INTP

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Artificial intelligence theorist

Yudkowsky: "You should see the strange looks I get when people realize how much I care about rationality."

Yudkowsky: "Do not believe you do others a favor if you accept their arguments; the favor is to you."

Yudkowsky: "The people I know who seem to make unusual efforts at rationality, are unusually honest, or, failing that, at least have unusually bad social skills."

Yudkowsky: "[I'm] very reflective, very analytic and [I have] mysterious trouble getting things done."

INTP

Kelley L. Ross

Philosopher

Ross: "My concern ... is to examine the extent to which arguments used by both sides of [a] debate are poor. ... Bad reasoning ... always serves to demonize ... and to further radicalize and irrationalize."

Ross: "Although [associates of Ayn Rand like] David Kelley, Leonard Peikoff, and others now try to develop her thought into a complete philosophical system, nothing can hide the relative shallowness of her knowledge."

Ross: "Anyone who cares to can still familiarize themselves with Jefferson's thinking and principles - as every American should in a day when Constitutional government has effectively been destroyed."

INTP

Steven E. Landsburg

Author of 'The Armchair Economist'

Landsburg: "In the absence of explicit contracts, people who lecture other people on their 'responsibilities' are almost always up to no good."

INTP

Annie Murphy Paul

Science writer, author of 'The Cult of Personality Testing'

Paul: "I want to learn from [people] who know more and understand more than me. ... Learn from, not blindly follow."

Paul: "The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator ... is used by 89 of the companies in the Fortune 100."

Paul: "While Jung was interested in complicating ... our world and the people in it, Myers seemed determined to tidy it up, make it neat."

Paul: "[Type enthusiasts emblazon themselves] with self-congratulatory slogans [like] 'ENTJs Are Life's Natural Leaders,' [or] 'INTPs Incubate Ideas.'"